The social tragedy of Castroism

By: Pedro Corzo - 17/02/2025

Guest columnist.
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The only achievements that will survive the dynastic totalitarianism of the Castro brothers and their putative son, Miguel Diaz-Canel, are propaganda and their repressive efficiency, including the material and human destruction caused by the system.

The failure has been so resounding that its prototypes of social miracles, Health, Education and Sports, have been removed from the showcase that the regime, in its delirium, presented to those who wanted to drown in the sea of ​​happiness of Castroism.

Health is a disaster. Hospitals do not have the means to meet the needs of those admitted. There is no bedding, food or medicine. Electricity is frequently cut off and hygiene is practically non-existent.

Infectious diseases hit the island several times a year. Bureaucrats systematically distort statistics. Lack of modern medicines and equipment, or at least in good working order, is more than frequent. There is a clear difference in the medical care received by the ruling class and foreigners on the one hand, and the population on the other.

Finally, there is the paradox that the medical power, as they like to call themselves, does not have enough professionals to care for the people because they rent them out to other countries in their eagerness to obtain multimillion-dollar incomes that will allow them to partially solve the perennial economic crisis of the system.

Education, the starting point for the indoctrination of new generations, faces a serious problem due to the continuous exodus of teachers to other jobs that provide them with more benefits, affecting the quality of these services.

However, the biggest failure in education was the so-called Country School, an attempt to replace the family with ideological communes in which parents would lose all ability to influence their offspring.

Children and adolescents were uprooted. Far from their usual patterns of behaviour, they behaved arbitrarily. The regime tried to impose military discipline in many of these centres and failed most of the time. The imposition of study and work to form the proposed new man, a kind of enlightened servant trained to serve the project, only reaped disappointment.

The Countryside Schools, one of Fidel Castro's favorite plans, were, according to students of the time, a concentration camp in which methods of extreme severity were practiced along with the most absolute disciplinary neglect, favoring spaces for violence among inmates, perversities of different kinds, including sexual abuse.

The third screen of the regime was sport. For years, Cuba was one of the world powers in this activity, a feature that favored Castroism because the award-winning athletes in significant numbers gave all the credit to the government for their victories, and others, more servile than average, dedicated their laurels to the dictator in chief.

However, Cuba's leading role in sport has been extinguished, mainly due to its inability to cover the huge expenses demanded by high-performance athletes. In addition, totalitarianism, although it retains power, suffers from widespread and massive exhaustion that will lead at some point to a death by consumption, similar to that suffered by the defunct Soviet Union.

The dictatorship skillfully mixed Health, Education and Sports with politics, achieving a propaganda cocktail of great force.

Their successes in each of these sectors offered an image of progress, freedom and justice that was far from the true national context that most international observers did not want to notice because they were supporters of the regime or because they received benefits from a government that granted them goods and privileges that the Cuban people did not have access to.

Advances in each of these sectors provided the system with various international advances and benefits. At the domestic level, they favoured the confusion and victimisation of society for the sake of ephemeral glories. The much publicised social "achievements" were the result of the formidable Soviet subsidies and not of the productive capacity of an inefficient government that has led the country to misery and absolute indebtedness.

Totalitarianism has turned Cuba into a beggar state since 1959, to the point that it receives food donations of products such as sugar, the most important commodity in our economy before the disaster that put the survival of the nation at risk occurred.

«The opinions published herein are the sole responsibility of its author».